High Efiiciency, Compact Heat Exchanger for Mobile Equipment Applications

This project leads the efforts of advance heat exchanger technology through the integration and convergence of the best emerging methods and materials for increased heat transfer and efficiency. Achieving high efficiency, beyond the present art, involves an in-depth analysis of present heat exchanger designs, by gaining an understanding of application specific demands within mobile equipment such as fuel cells and batteries, to implement new design flexibility, which cycles from new materials impacting new manufacturing methods and vice versa. A plethora of energy generators and consumers both yielding heat sources from power inefficiencies exists in the next generation of vehicles. The requirement to dissipate heat ranges from air-to-air, liquid-to-air, and liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers that are both single phase and multi-phase systems. These processes will perform in the future by taking advantage of new materials, specifically nanotechnology, in order to realize significant gains in performance with new heat transfer methods that potentially have the means to accelerate heat transfer using non-linear design and quantum tunneling. Lastly, new materials utilized for sensors coupled with increasingly powerful control systems will achieve the highest energy efficiency by enabling the entire heat transfer system, including the heat exchangers, to operate at their optimal levels.